Quote:
Originally Posted by aberdeen5698
In the meantime, the population will grow, demanding more capacity. Platooned cars carrying individual occupants are still way more space consumptive than a mass transit vehicle. The geometry and physics are against you, and they can't be altered by technology - at least not until we can "beam" things via a Star Trek-like transporter.
|
Of course you can't fit as many cars and passengers in the same space as a train, but you don't need to. The passenger load will be spread out evenly throughout the city. You don't think there's enough room for at least twice as many vehicles on the roads with V2V communication? When a light turns green at an intersection, a car goes through (per lane) every 2 seconds. A platoon of vehicles would mean at least 4 cars go through every 2 seconds. We've seen platooning in real world situations on freeways, so this is not fantasy. Even without V2V communication, all the car has to do is react twice as fast to the car in front of it moving forward and you have double the efficiency at intersections. Surely a computer is at least twice as fast as a human.